Category: Web/Tech

Sometimes I really wonder what Steve Ballmer is thinking. Actually, recently I’ve been wondering about that every time I read a transcript of what he says.

Today Ballmer’s Microsoft analyst day kickoff presentation took the cake:

And last, but certainly not least…in a sense I think about us as a business that we might characterize as multicore. If the new generations of microprocessors are all supposed to have multiple cores on a single chip, Microsoft has multiple core capabilities or operations or businesses in a single entity.

I hope Pat Gelsinger read this too. Pat recently spoke at Stanford about Intel’s multiple core strategy and, in the the Q&A, he mentioned having had a very difficult meeting with Bill Gates a couple of years ago where Gates went semi-ballistic once he understood what Gelsinger was telling him about moving away from ever increasing speed in single processor chips and having to move to multiple cores per chip just to deal with the heat issues. According to Gelsinger, Gates didn’t think Microsoft knew how to optimize its software for the “multicore” environment.

And then today, Ballmer describes Microsoft as a multicore company. Go figure…and smile.

A friend asked me about “best practices” for using the Kyocera KPC650 PC EVDO Card (via Verizon Wireless) on my 15-inch Powerbook. Here’s what I replied…

Wow, the Wall St. Journal Online home page looks very spiffy this morning – the result of a new update. It’s very well done – the page just looks dramatically better – with some new use of colors, a bit more elements of graphic interest, etc. According to their commentary about the design changes, taking advantage of today’s larger screens was part of their objective.

I’ve recently been spending some time doing similar work over on our Payments News blog – which we migrated to what I called our “high definition” version last weekend. Reader response was uniformly positive to the “HD” format changes we made. It’s interesting this morning to see the WSJ also embracing the larger screen sizes in their new remodel – and giving me some new ideas re: colors, graphics and layout!

Mark Morford’s column on SFGate.com this morning had it just right for me – “Let’s all get ADD!“

Ever work with a company whose staff is all appropriately Treo equipped?

You know the drill – you’re talking to one of them from across the table, after about 8-9 seconds her eyes begin to recede, she gets this quizzical little wrinkle in her brow, down go the eyes, up comes the hand and she’s re-engaged with her Treo – and you’ve lost her. Call it “TDD” – Treo Distraction Disorder. Hooked. Except, they hate the phone! No wonder they email so often!

I went through the 12 Step Program on this particular addiction about 4 years ago. I was an early Blackberry/Crackberry addict – and just couldn’t live without it. That little vibrator would immediately capture my attention – regardless of what else was happening around me. I was composing emails while driving up I-280. My wife wanted to sit with other guys at lunch – who would talk to her. When she’d talk to me, her first words were always: “Eye Contact?” She knew if she didn’t get eye contact, I simply wouldn’t hear anything she said.

Fortunately for me, I went on a long family vacation overseas and had to leave that Blackberry behind. When I came back, it was sitting on my dresser. I’d had such a wonderful time without it that I said “I’m just going to leave you there for a while.” Six months later, I finally got around to cancelling my subscription. I never did pick it up – except to toss it into the trash one day about a year later.

This post from last year talks about a similar problem with IM – just another addiction.

Mark said it very, very well in his column this morning:

We equate deranged, caffeinated busyness with smarts, with success, when in fact the exact opposite is true. Just ask the yogis, the gurus, the healers of the past 5,000 years: It is actually when you calm the mind, clear things out, breathe deep and sleep deeper and clean out the toxins and the caffeine and the Ambien, that’s when real wisdom, real intuition comes your way. The rest is just, well, noise. Happy delicious annoying caffeinated sexy fun infuriating obnoxious unstoppable noise, but still noise.

Steps to an ecology of mind…

Josh Ellis writes asking whether there’s utility in being able to take one’s personal email filtering rules, export them to a standard XML format, and then point new/other email clients at them.

Seems to me this is another example of what Bill Burnham and, earlier, Dan Bricklin, have been talking about. In Dan’s case, his SMBmeta proposal was designed to enable small businesses to post content and pointers to information about their companies using a standardized format. Seems like what Josh is thinking of could be a component of a “PERSONALmeta” proposal – where individuals keep data, information, rules, etc. that’s their own.

In a world where everyone has a website, this seems like a natural conclusion. Maybe OpenID fits in here too?

I was dumbfounded when I went to the GE corporate web site today to look at their earnings report – and they had archived their earnings conference call as a podcast – along with a link to an RSS feed. Based on the data in the feed, it looks like they starting making things available this way back in April of last year.

Wonder when the first US bank will get with this kind of investor relations program? Or, for that matter, Apple itself? Apple has loads of RSS feeds – but none (that I could find) for corporate financial/investor information.